Active center of gravity management techniques involve the tilting of the vehicle chassis relative to the surface on which it rests in order to position the center of gravity with respect to the support points on the terrain. The prior art focus has been on the effect that regular and irregular surfaces of the ground have on the vehicle as well as the positioning of the vehicle system alignment relative to the ground and to reduced abrupt changes in the position of the vehicle relative to passengers. Some prior art systems include control systems that measure movement and timing of the suspension devices and after contact with an irregular surface the system calculates the reaction to take.
The term “center of gravity” (CG) is often interchangeably used with the term “center of mass.” Although they can be different concepts, they do coincide when the object under consideration is in a uniform gravitational field. The center of mass of a system of particles is defined as the average of their physically weighted masses. For a continuous distribution of mass the CG is the same as the centroid of the shape.
The concept of center of mass or CG was first introduced by the ancient Greek physicist, mathematician and engineer Archimedes of Syracuse. Archimedes showed that the torque exerted on the lever by weights resting at various points along the lever is the same as what it would be if all the weights were moved to a single point, or their center of mass. Working with floating bodies Archimedes demonstrated that the orientation of a floating object is the one that makes its center of mass as low as possible. He even developed mathematical techniques for finding the center of gravity of objects of uniform density of various well-defined shapes such as the triangle, hemisphere and a frustum.
What is needed in the art is an active suspension that changes the center of gravity in an efficient economical manner.